Pomp and Circumstance

That would be me on the Jumbotron....

I'm back in Florida at the beach house after spending the night on a red eye flight. I got in this morning. Can I say that the neck pillow ranks as one of the world's best inventions? I slept so much better with the neck pillow than on the flight to LA where my bobbing neck almost snapped in half trying to sleep!

Well, my weekend was unreal. I went from running among the geckos on this Florida island, to speaking at Pauley Pavilion(!!) to UCLA's Commencement for the Department of English! It was a little weird to come back to the big city life that this retreat was meant to be an escape from... to be driving my car (which btw, I am so happy to leave parked for the next five weeks... far away from the gas crisis) and to be amongst, of all things.... people! And lots of them!

There were many things that were unreal about the whole thing. I thought it best to sum up the experience in a videoblog below.

My commencement speech experience on videoblog!

Untitled from kristina wong on Vimeo.

After recording this, I realized I am totally dressed inappropriately for the video blog. Maybe I could have slapped on some make-up or worn more clothes... but it's freaking hot outside! What do you expect? Screw it! You get me in the raw! And you get to see my granny panties coming out of my shorts in the beginning. SIGH.

Check out the dolphin sleeves they gave me on this gown. I was actually able to use them to store my speech and blackberry. (Perhaps storage is really what they are for?) I think I was the only one at this commencement wearing plastic jewelry.

What a great Father's Day gift for my dad to be able to bring him back to my old college campus and have him hear me speak at commencement! I was so proud to give him that moment.

They had an old bio for me and introduced me as "Kristina Wong is a Performance Artist." I almost wanted to laugh at how weird that sounded. And I am sure they did too.

"Yes, that's right. You heard the man. I'm a performance artist. Quit laughing."

Here I am standing among the Harry Potter people.

Hmmm.... It's not really the 99 seat theater I'm used to.

Seeing as how many people were there, maybe I should I have worked in a pitch to get people into my "multilevel marketing scheme."

"Now if you can get three friends, to get three friends...."